SS nerf

Spirit Shell For the next 10 sec, your Heal, Flash Heal, Greater Heal, and Prayer of Healing no longer heal but instead create absorption shields that last 15 sec.

While I do agree SS with the 4 set and trinket to reduce its CD is going to be very strong, players WITHOUT them get burned pretty hard.

With current gear a non PI SS is 6 casts. That 6th cast is ESSENTIAL to refresh SS on the first group to give you complete raid coverage with around 8 seconds margin of error before it falls off. With these changes full coverage is nearly impossible with a meager 2-3 seconds margin of error. While this increases the skill cap for disc it will make timing SS A LOT more difficult if boss abilities are on a priority CD like ToT rather then a hard CD.

I'm merely bringing out the quality of life issues of this change and am not even touching the throughput nerf this implies, witch depending on the encounter and dmg patterns I don't believe Disc even deserves.

This is a nerf mainly to 25m disc priests. I haven't been able to cap out a spirit shell since 5.1. 10 man disc priests seem to not have any problem doing it and they still won't with this change. We'll probably need to reach some sort of haste cap to be able to cast 5 spirit shells on all 5 groups and we'll have to learn how to time it correctly all over again.

This is a nerf mainly to 25m disc priests. I haven't been able to cap out a spirit shell since 5.1. 10 man disc priests seem to not have any problem doing it and they still won't with this change. We'll probably need to reach some sort of haste cap to be able to cast 5 spirit shells on all 5 groups and we'll have to learn how to time it correctly all over again.

Yeah I'm mainly looking at it from a 25 man PoV. Timing is gonna be a pain, could easily be fixed by making the shield last 20 seconds instead of 15.

The 4 set will make a very large difference, I was thinking about using a different talent other than pi but I feel like now it's gonna be needed in order to get 5 group casts off before the 4 set. That extra 5 seconds off is gonna really hurt.

I have just calculated (hopefully correctly) the amount of haste needed to get 5 casts off, and these were the results
8095 haste (with 5% raid buff) to get exactly 5 casts within exactly 10 seconds
6579 haste (with 5% raid buff and borrowed time for the first cast of PoH)

bear in mind that these are exact numbers, so in reality, you will need a little bit more - something over 7k if counting borrowed time

Is it just me or is anyone else seeing the 5 seconds shaved off of spirit shell, then looking at the 2 piece and the 4 piece and saying hey, pop AA get a 10% crit buff, pop spirit shell, screw the haste buff, yay 3500 mastery, and not even bother to use spirit shell at all and instead just spam the raid with shields? More prevalent in ten man I would imagine but.

Is it just me or is anyone else seeing the 5 seconds shaved off of spirit shell, then looking at the 2 piece and the 4 piece and saying hey, pop AA get a 10% crit buff, pop spirit shell, screw the haste buff, yay 3500 mastery, and not even bother to use spirit shell at all and instead just spam the raid with shields? More prevalent in ten man I would imagine but.

On heavy movement fights, this will most likely be the case, like I would totally do that during like P3 Heroic Lei Shen right now, and Im sure there are plenty fights that will end up occurring in ToT.

This seems like a bit of a poorly thought out nerf. It hits Disc hardest in 25 man (where it is already rivalled easily by the other healing specs) and, to maintain throughput, will make the 4 piece coupled with the CD reduction and passive 14% crit, haste and mastery trinkets almost essential.

Is it just me or is anyone else seeing the 5 seconds shaved off of spirit shell, then looking at the 2 piece and the 4 piece and saying hey, pop AA get a 10% crit buff, pop spirit shell, screw the haste buff, yay 3500 mastery, and not even bother to use spirit shell at all and instead just spam the raid with shields? More prevalent in ten man I would imagine but.

Nerfing a spec ability to compensate for a setbonus that will only be in use for a fraction of the time is bad style.
(Since not everyone will get it and even those wo do won't have it at the beginning.)

Nerfing a spec ability to compensate for a setbonus that will only be in use for a fraction of the time is bad style.
(Since not everyone will get it and even those wo do won't have it at the beginning.)

I wished they'd do something like how they scaled divine hymn for 10/25. Like give 10 man 6 seconds to cast spirit shell and 25m 12secs. That way we would still be able to pretty much hit all 5 groups with atleast 1 spirit shell. Or maybe scale it as 10/15 seconds for 10/25m if it's meant to be a nerf to 10 man